1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for determining thermal characteristics of instruction sets.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today typically include one or more computer processors capable of executing computer program instructions. Computer program instructions generate heat in the processor when executed. Some types of computer program instructions generate more heat than other types of computer program instructions. Floating point operations, for example, may generate more than load/store operations which in turn may generate more heat than integer math operations when executed by the computer processor. Heat generated by a computer system may cause malfunctions in hardware or performance degradation. Users often desire to manage heat generation by controlling the workflow of computer program instructions generating different amounts of heat. That is, controlling the order in which computer program instructions are executed may be useful in managing heat generation in computer processor. It would be useful therefore, to determining thermal characteristics of instruction sets to control such a workflow.